Quilled Muse

Hello Journal,
it seems like an eternity since I have sat down to write an update.  There is much to tell...but I think I will stick with simply showing what has happened.  Since I have covered both the Maasai Girl and Shaolin Monks already, I will share the model I developed after my "Viper Wing" dragon concept.  His name is Riddley, as named by one of my talented lab instructors, Seth Freeman.

This was a concept I came up with, after doing some research and getting inspiration.  Usually, I like to do some concept work in Zbrush, to give me a feel for the size and mass of the creature.  But since I had pretty solid drawings, I immediately went into Maya and was able to get the base mesh good and solid before heading into Zbrush, which is the way I prefer to work anyways.

If you would like to see more of this initial process, click HERE.


So, without further to ado, here is one of the closer head renders:




Since I was focusing on the modeling aspect of this creature, I really …

Hello Journal,
I looked back on my monk post, and I realized there was much I didn't show, so I am going to give a final overview of the Shaolin Monk piece now.
This piece was meant to be a sculptural piece, so I didn't paint any textures for this piece.  In fact, I had someone ask me how I colored the monks, and the truth is...I really didn't.  :)
Nuke, once again, did the magic.

Here are some screenshots of my maya setup:





I also did a lot in Zbrush, because it was easier to get the organic folds of the cloth by sculpting them:



All I really used for the monks were my normals I generated from zbrush and Xnormal.  Here are two examples:




 So, if we zoom ahead a couple of painful render times, this is what I came up with out of Maya's mental ray:


But, knowing me,...I decided to have a little fun.  This piece was supposed to be a dramatic, sculptural piece, but while I was waiting for other renders to finish...(for instance, the ViperWing Dragon Renders..ha ha), I quickly …

Hello Journal,
I am working on a couple new projects right now...so a lot of new things are under way!
So, since nothing is in a "post-able" state, I thought I would show some older, environment stuff.

ENVIRO 1 -

A couple months ago, I did some environment modeling, texturing, and lighting for one of my classes.  It was actually two classes, and I chose to combine the two together and work on one asset of my creation.  So, instead of modeling and environment in the first class, and then shading & lighting a completely different environment in the next class, I decided to shade & light the environment I modeled.
All the textures are procedurally done.  As much as I love hand-painting textures, this was a good exercise as well.
Here is the reference photo for this project:





And here are some screencaps of the model that worked on in Maya:







 After the model was done, I set up Cameras and started blocking out lighting:



So after a lot of wrangling nodes in the hypershade..…